good news for email marketing, gmail showing images automatically soon

Yeah, sounds good, but still has the little problem with the segmented inbox where emails often end up marginalized in the "promotions" tab.

That is great news for tracking purposes. This will definitely help with split testing. As for the segmented email 'problem' mentioned by the poster above, it isn't much of a problem if you educate your list members on workarounds RIGHT AFTER they sign up. The downside to this is you give up an OTO opportunity by placing this message in the confirmation redirect.

May benefit legit senders but will also benefit spammers because they will know instantly that they have a "live one" and so the bombardment can begin.

Mark

Really good news for all internet marketers with email lists. It will definitely improve clickthrough rates as well.

Ok news, but I still think plain text is the way to go, since more and more are using cellphones to open emails, and data speed is not always good on cellphones...

Those are some pretty depressing stats Bob Ross, I hope it picks p for you...

now that is handy.... I always wondered about how not having images display would effect conversions...

Danny

Big difference, when websites are not mobilized, there's a good chance people will not wait for the page to load.

Me personally, when an image takes long to load, I move on without readying the email. Not only that, phone companies are lowering lower data speeds after a couple GB's making it even worse. Plain is always the best way to go IMO

I just looked at your stats again, didn't see the %, I read it without my glasses earlier

It is indeed mostly good news for email marketers, as we can now include images in the email to make it more attractive and it will show 100% of the time for Gmail users (those who have this feature available - it has not been rolled out to all users) and that can increase the click-through rate if done right.

It is only an issue for a small section of email service providers (they are mostly more concerned with geo tracking - tracking the exact emails and IP addresses that opened the email) but it appears there is a fix for it with regards to the open tracking pixel that they use. So it is up to them to fix it. If there are no irregularities with your email opens in the last two weeks as compared to before, then there are no issues.

Of course, this does not solve the problem with Yahoo/Outlook/other email users with regards to showing images. In Yahoo, the setting by default is that HTML emails with images (including open pixels) will trigger a red warning message above the email saying "This message contains blocked images". Of course, if the user changes the setting to show images for all emails or from contacts, this red warning message won't show. But imagine if a user sees this warning message, and is not aware that it is because of a "quirk" of the settings, then they may think the email is spam if they forgot they signed up for your list.

Personally, I use a mix of HTML emails and text emails and alternate between them. I use text emails to make the email look more personal. Both methods work for many people, so my theory is that if you use a mixture of both methods, you get the best of both worlds, and Yahoo users won't see that red warning message too many times (and perhaps they may change the options to show images all of the time). It is like a game of football, sometimes you have to defend, sometimes you have to attack, and there are different strategies even going both ways.

The Gmail Tabs are a bigger issue, but most autoresponder emails are now going into the Primary Tab, which is why we have not been hearing too many complaints about it. However, people can still move the emails from the Primary Tab to the Promotions Tab, so the problem is not completed eradicated. And those autoresponder emails/broadcasts that are going into the Primary Tab are actually meant for the Updates tab (if you turn on the Updates tab, many autoresponder emails will now end up there) so the problem is not completely removed. Some emails that are still going into the Promotions Tab are because of certain wordage in the email such as including words like "unsubscribe", "free", "disclaimer", "disclosure" more than once (not hard and fast, but generally) and basically telling Gmail outright that it is a promotion email (when other emails from the same autoresponder company are going into Primary).

It is also worth noting that not all Gmail accounts have the Tabs and images showing automatically. On a few of my Gmail accounts that have more than a million messages in them, Tabs have still not been enabled, and it probably never will, because there are too many messages and it may take too long for the filters to do the job.

Anyway, the name of the game is simply to adapt to the changes and make more changes of your own.

These changes are mostly coming about because of saturation and overexapansion of markets everywhere (email marketing - email clutter/Gmail Tabs/mobile email/competing media like mobile apps/FB/Twitter, affiliate marketing - many programs going "underground", search engine results - read Google Slaps, Wall Street - increased volatility and printing of money that is keeping it going - this is one place where it is expanding and contracting regularly, real estate - just starting to recover but cooling in many parts of the world) so now companies are making changes mostly because of increased regulation and their stats are showing something or their profits from ads are decreasing.

The world is changing is a common saying, now it's changing even faster. And some changes can be for the better like this Gmail images change.

Fabian

I never liked that GMail( or any email service for that matter) had images hidden in the first place. If it is a message that is getting into my inbox and not my spam it must have some kind of significance. Whatever the reason is that Google decided to make the changes, I think it was a good idea and I support it. Things change all the time, but as far as email marketing is concerned emails with images have a high click through rate (CTR) so with that being said, Google allowing images to show up by default is always a good thing.